An IASH Work-in-Progress Seminar, delivered by Dr Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024)
Decolonial Braidings: Intermedial Readings of Peruvian Contemporary Comics (2010–)
In the years surrounding Peruvian independence bicentennial celebrations, a number of comics and graphic novels returning to our "collective past” have been published. Many of these comics are inspired or adapt previous works or figures of Peruvian literature and culture, from pre-hispanic and Inca times to present events. That the comics touch on these topics, to some extent, may seem reasonable, yet it is particular to the Peruvian region. In countries such as Argentina and Brazil, while we also see adaptations and historical comics, these are only a section of a larger industry, including a whole range of auteur and autobiographical comics. While the reason behind this difference may be obvious: Argentina and Brazil have larger comics industries and are not afraid to fund auteur publications, my sense is that there are some other reasons driving our constant return, in Peruvian comics, to a literary and cultural genealogy that preceded us, particularly to texts/events from the moments when Peru’s national identity was in question. My aim in this seminar will be to introduce a reading of this corpus of comics that considers the genealogies of image making regimes in which they emerge. I will argue that we may better understand the reasons behind their turn to these objects of the past, when we perform an intermedial reading: that is when we read them within an intermedial genealogy of texts that have been trying to understand, in different ways and contexts, what it means to be Peruvian.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
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